


retribution

by that_one_scared_gay



Series: of inevitability [1]
Category: Winx Club
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bloom-centric, F/F, Post-Season/Series 01, kind of, my contribution to the icy x bloom agenda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 15:35:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30007080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/that_one_scared_gay/pseuds/that_one_scared_gay
Summary: Afterwards, when the last of the decay has been cleaned off, and the Trix are safely locked away, Bloom can’t go over an hour without holding fire in her hand.Sometimes, she’ll stop what she’s doing and feel for the magic that’s become so familiar to her over the past year (hers, still. always hers, even when they took it). She’ll gather it together, pull it up to the surface, and form a flame.Just to prove that she can.
Relationships: Bloom & Icy (Winx Club), Bloom/Icy (Winx Club), if you squint, it's kinda subtle
Series: of inevitability [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2207367
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	retribution

**Author's Note:**

> well. this is a thing now.
> 
> this little thing has been sitting in my google docs for ages. it's just a oneshot for now, but i might write a continuation in the future.
> 
> also i haven't watched winx club in ages and have no memory of season three so... the events for that might be all wonky
> 
> also i definitely don't give valtor the credit he (probably) deserves (idk i literally don't remember him)

Afterwards, when the last of the decay has been cleaned off, and the Trix are safely locked away, Bloom can’t go over an hour without holding fire in her hand.

Sometimes, she’ll stop what she’s doing and feel for the magic that’s become so familiar to her over the past year ( _hers, still. always hers, even when they took it_ ). She’ll gather it together, pull it up to the surface, and form a flame.

Just to prove that she can.

* * *

She has to stop doing it after a while. Turns out her classmates aren’t okay with her setting her hands of fire at any given moment.

Still, when she stops calling the dragon’s flame to her during the day, the nightmares come back.

Every night, she sees herself back there. Back pressed to her living room wall, held there by ice, by _Her_ powers. Her parents bound and gagged in the corner, after Bloom jumped in a vortex to save them.

She doesn’t have a drop of attention to spare for them, though. Only for the witch holding her hostage, lifting her chin with a manicured hand and telling her the truth about herself, about her family.

And then stepping back to join her sisters and take _everything_ from her.

She doesn’t know the incantation they used. Her mind was too distressed to pay attention to the words. But she remembers seeing the them, the crystals, hovering above their heads in a triangle. Remembers seeing _hers_ , long, thin, and ice blue. Glowing, as it filled up with magic. _Bloom’s_ magic.

And then they were gone. And a piece of her was gone with them.

The following weeks had been hell. It was worse than just being powerless. She’d been powerless for sixteen years and had never felt anything wrong.

No, it was more than that. Every moment, every breath she took felt empty. Wrong, missing something, a piece of herself so intrinsic to her existence she hadn’t noticed it until it was gone.

And then she’d met Daphne at Lake Roccaluce and learned that what she was missing couldn’t actually be stolen. From there, she only had to look a little harder before she found it again.

But now that she knows what it feels like to have her magic taken from her, she relives it every night.

* * *

When she wakes up in the wee hours of the morning, sweating and shaking and desperate to reassure herself that _it was just a dream, she still has it_ , she’ll gather her magic into a flame and hold it in her palm. Watch it, and feel how it responds to her, for hours.

Sometimes until the sun comes up.

And not only does that mean she’s tired as all hell the next day, but, well. Flora might not be sensitive to light when she’s sleeping, but her plants sure are. Bloom can see them in her periphery, even when the brunt of her focus is on the fire, waking up and angling themselves towards her, towards the light.

She knows it’s fucking up their growth rates and their light-dark cycles, and she really, _really_ doesn’t want to mess up her friend’s babies just because she’s insecure about her magic so-

Bloom does something crazy.

She goes to the tunnels under the school, because even though, at this point, everyone knows the Trix used them to sneak into Alfea, no one’s bothered to close them up.

She takes the one that leads to Cloud Tower, and, once there, she finds her way to the library.

She doesn’t know how she’s managed to remain undetected, since the last time she snuck into the witch school (not _actually_ the last time- the time before that, when the girls were with her, and all Bloom had to worry about was that some senior witches had decided to mess with them and had stolen Stella’s ring), she’d had to deal with spiders and slob monsters.

She’s not complaining. Even without anything chasing her, Cloud Tower is still the creepiest place Bloom’s ever been to.

In the dead of night, her footsteps are the only sound in the library as she walks through the aisles, wondering where she’d find the spell to take a person’s magic.

Cloud Tower’s library is better than Alfea’s, it seems. It wants to help her find the knowledge she seeks, and does so with very little prompting.

She discovers this when a book comes flying right at her, flipping open by itself, pages flicking until it stops, hovering in front of her like an offering.

Bloom screams, a little. _Quietly_.

She takes it out of the air.

The page the book stopped on showcases the Vacuum spell. It has to purpose of taking in a large volume of magic, to be used or to be stored.

It requires an enchanted crystal, which can be kept in the physical realm of sent to a pocket dimension, and an incantation to take power.

Bloom pores over the words, trying to commit them to memory. She holds the book in her hands and wonders if it’s the same one Icy used to learn how to steal the dragon’s flame.

The thought makes her sick, and she drops the book like it burned her. It starts floating before it can hit the floor, but Bloom pays it no mind as she runs to the tunnels.

Back in Alfea, she crawls into bed, quietly, as to not wake anyone. And the next day she jokes with the other girls and smiles when she’s meant to, and pretends like this wasn’t the first time in a month that she didn’t have nightmares.

She goes back to Cloud Tower that night, and the next.

During the weekend, it’s terrifyingly easy to beg off her dormmates’ company to do some shopping in Magix. She finds a little nondescript crystal store across the street from Tecna’s favorite tech shop, and she buys herself a crystal; long, thin, and ice blue.

It costs less than her weekly allowance.

After, it’s only a matter of finding an empty classroom at Alfea and enchanting the crystal. Bloom manages it on her third try. She wonders how long it took Icy to do it. Less, probably.

Now, her crystal - her _vacuum_ \- could hold the greatest power in the known universe, if someone knew the words to say.

Bloom leaves it in its pocket dimension, usually. Sometimes, when she’s alone, she keeps it on a cord around her neck, and feels its cool touch against her skin.

And she keeps going to the Cloud Tower library, whenever she wakes up from a nightmare, and reads the same words over and over until her eyes burn.

* * *

Then the school year ends, and it feels like they barely get a moment to breathe before a girl stumbles out of the woods talking about pixies and an ancient evil awoken.

Bloom decides that she likes Aisha. After the period of getting to know each other, they find that she fits in well with the group, with her fierceness and stubbornness and the overwhelming love she has for the pixies.

She and Musa get along like a house on fire, and they all adapt to these new dynamics as five becomes six.

As for the other things that Aisha brings with her…

Lockette is a welcome, if unexpected addition to her life. The pixie bond is, well- it’s strange, to be honest. The immediate love and trust that is thrust upon her is little disconcerting.

But if you’d told Bloom a year ago that she was a fairy and she’d be calling fire to her with barely a thought, she’d have thought you were insane. 

Then a girl crash-landed on her planet chased by ghouls and an ogre, and Bloom got used to rolling with the punches.

Between the discovery of the pixies and the threat of Darkar, Bloom’s nightmares take a bit of a backseat.

And if she freezes for a second when she sees Icy again, out of Lightrock and more powerful than ever, well, it’s not like anyone notices.

They fight, and they win. And the pixies are back, and the Winx stop the witches from stealing the codex at Red Fountain, and it seems like everything is fine.

A week later, they’re back. 

They fight again, and Icy kills Bloom’s boyfriend - but it’s alright, she can save him. 

And after, when Tecna is mad at Timmy and Darkar has a piece of the codex, Bloom pulls her vacuum out of its pocket dimension, and wonders.

She makes a few more trips to Cloud Tower, mostly undercover, but, once, all six of them go to protect the codex piece there (and isn’t that a trip, trying to explain to her friends why that book flew right at her the second she stepped into the school’s library).

They lose Cloud Tower’s codex piece to the Trix, which means Darkar only has two more to go.

And then she’s possessed.

Or, well, maybe _influenced_ is the better word. She’s meaner, snappier, more reckless. And Lockette is the only one who can snap her out of it until she _can’t_ , and suddenly Bloom’s goals align with Darkar’s, and they _will_ get the ultimate power.

After, she doesn’t recall much of her time spent as Dark Bloom. It’s like she was trapped in a fog, and it distorted everything - her perceptions, her thoughts, her motivations - but she remembers seeing the Trix slinking around Shadowhaunt, glaring and resentful at being replaced. And she remembers how she looked at Icy and thought of her vacuum, and laughed while she glowered at her.

Then there is Relix, and the Phoenix, and she was calling forth the Power. And seeing her friends, helpless and defeated and pleading for her to come back, gave her the will to push through the fog and heal herself.

Darkar is destroyed, and as they leave Relix, Bloom worries, briefly, about the Trix, in their strange fusion form. For a minute there, it was like they’d been on the same side as the winx, even though, really, they wanted the power for themselves. The enemy of my enemy, and all that.

(it was more familiar to the Trix she knew, for them to want power for themselves. before this whole thing happened, Bloom would have laughed at the idea of Icy submitting to someone else’s will.)

(then Valtor happens, and Bloom starts thinking she doesn’t know Icy at all.)

(because one time can be written off as coincidence, but twice is forming a habit, right?)

* * *

When Bloom finds out the Trix escaped Omega, she’s… well, she’s not all that surprised, actually. They’d already escaped Lightrock, even if they had help. It’s not such a stretch to believe they’d escape the next prison the Magix Council threw them in.

(when Bloom finds out Omega is a frozen realm, she wants to call a meeting with the Magix Council and _set them all on fire_ , because that level of stupidity deserves nothing less.)

(she’s starting to understand why the magic dimension relies on barely-schooled teenagers to solve their problems.)

Valtor is powerful, and terrifying, and he wants to steal the realm’s magical objects, which makes him the run-of-the-mill bad guy. But he claims to have a connection with Bloom, and that, she’d rather not dwell on.

But even with a new baddie at the helm, it’s the same as always: Winx v.s. Trix, like the good old times.

Inevitably, Bloom finds herself chasing after Icy, separated from the rest of the group.

It ought to concern her, maybe, how much she’s grown to enjoy their fights.

(it ought to, but it doesn’t. especially with the smirk on Icy’s face assuring her that the feeling is mutual.)

It starts like it always does, a clashing of fire and ice that leaves the air around them steaming. Icy freezes her solid; Bloom breaks out of it, knocking her back in the process.

And maybe it’s all this talk of stealing magic that has Bloom calling forth her vacuum as Icy falls to the ground.

The ice witch looks worn down, Bloom’s attack having been stronger than usual.

Still, her eyes are open in time to see Bloom standing above her with her arms raised, chanting the words she knows by heart now.

Icy’s magic bursts out of her chest like an ice blast, straight into the crystal. Somehow, Bloom is the one who recoils.

Icy’s eyes gleam with shock and something else. Bloom can only stare back at her, the crystal ice cold where it touches her skin.

_‘I have her now,’_ she finds herself thinking.

Then the sound of a blast nearby reminds her there’s still a fight going on, and Bloom sends the vacuum back to its pocket dimension and flies to join the rest of the Winx.

She leaves Icy there on the floor, and she can feel those eyes burning into her as she goes.

They beat Darcy and Stormy, and leave the planet.

Back at Alfea, in the safety of her dorm, Bloom makes an excuse to avoid the celebratory dinner, and waits until she’s sure everyone has left before calling it again.

The crystal feels different, now that it’s filled with magic.

It’s colder, but it also feels _heavier_ , somehow.

She knows, from her studies, that magic doesn’t have physical weight, but she feels it all the same.

After a moment’s hesitation, Bloom reaches out to the energy inside the crystal.

Icy’s magic is volatile, but familiar, after three years on the receiving end of it.

It seems like it’s resisting her at first, and Bloom wonders if it knows it’s been stolen.

(it doesn’t, of course. magic doesn’t work like that. it’s not sentient. it has no choice in who wields it. her freshman year is proof enough of that.)

(not even the dragon’s flame can choose what it’s used for.)

(it doesn’t know it’s been stolen, but Bloom does. that’s what makes her hesitate in taking control of it.)

Eventually, Bloom manages to make it snow in her room. Then, she experiments with throwing ice daggers at the wall. And finally, she freezes an old action figure she bough at a convention on Earth. She picks it up, staring at it in a sort of wonder.

Actually using Icy’s magic feels… _God_ , it feels like violation and vengeance at once. It’s wrong, except in all the ways that it’s so, so _right_. It makes her insides coil.

She unfreezes the action figure with her own magic, the heat as at home in her hand as it’s even been.

She cleans up the snow and the ice shards, ridding the dorm of any evidence for the other girls to find.

She goes to bed early, and doesn’t dream at all.

On their next encounter with the Trix, Icy is noticeably absent, and Darcy and Stormy are out for blood.

Bloom realizes this when Stormy electrocutes her for the third time and Darcy slams her against the wall.

They’d incapacitated the others moments into the fight, bypassing Aisha’s and Stella’s enchantix like it was nothing.

Clearly, their fury is focused on Bloom.

“How _dare_ you?!” Darcy spits in her face while Stormy glowers.

Bloom thinks about summoning a flurry, just because, but self-preservation wins out.

She keeps the crystal safely stored away and stays silent.

“You’re not even going to _say_ anything?!” Stormy looks like she’s going to punch her in the face.

Bloom glares, unrepentant.

“She’ll figure it out. I did.”

She ends up making it out of the fight okay, though Darcy gives her vertigo so bad Bloom nearly vomits in midair.

Afterwards, five fairies wonder, with vague worry, why Icy didn’t show up, not noticing that their unofficial leader is suspiciously silent.

Back home, Bloom sneaks out into the woods outside of school and freezes an entire clearing, just because she can.

(she nearly leaves it like that, but then she hears Flora’s voice in her head and undoes it all.)

(and that’s how she learns Icy ~~has~~ had the power to thaw ice as well.)

It feels wrong to think that she won’t get anything lasting out of this, so she gets her action figure from the door and spends an hour creating an almost identical copy, using ice.

Then she has to figure out how to stop it from melting. 

(the librarian gives her some weird looks while she’s researching, and Bloom wishes, not for the first time, that Alfea’s autonomous research mechanisms were as refined as Cloud Tower’s.)

A week later, they’re at the Museum of Magix to fight Valtor, and Bloom isn’t at all surprised to see Icy hovering between her sisters, ready to serve as a distraction.

Her crystal is on display with barely a thought. Immediately, Icy’s eyes lock onto it.

Bloom is under no delusions as to how this will go. You can’t steal people’s magic. Not truly. She knows this better than anyone.

This was never going to be permanent.

She should be going after Valtor, should be completely focused on preventing him from stealing… whatever it is he’s after this time.

But Icy’s gaze moves from the crystal to Bloom’s eyes, and Bloom is moving before she really thinks about it.

It’s all too easy to allow herself to be chased across the building. She dodges an ice blast with a grin, and purposely sends fire back. They play this game of cat and mouse along the corridors, with little regard for the artifacts that become collateral damage to the chase.

(is it still a chase if she wants to be caught?)

It ends with Bloom frozen to the wall, arms and legs restrained, and Icy stalking towards her with calculated ease.

Bloom smiles, all teeth. “This seems familiar.”

Icy smirks, grabbing her chin, and, _oh_ , her nails should still qualify as legal weapons.

Her voice is low when she speaks: “You have something that belongs to me.”

Bloom shivers, and it has nothing to do with the ice encasing her.

“Then take it,” she breathes.

Cold fingers wrap around the crystal, and Bloom is still connected enough to the magic there to feel it respond to the touch.

Casually, Icy freezes and shatters the cord keeping it attached to Bloom’s neck.

It starts to glow in her hand, and Bloom watches, enraptured, as Icy tilts her head up and closes her eyes, vulnerable for a single moment as her magic is returned to her.

She’s breathtaking like this, Bloom realizes, then tries her best to push the thought away.

Now isn’t the time to unpack any of that.

The ice around her is steaming, her own magic acting without her command, subconsciously knowing what she needs.

A simple push of will helps it the rest of the way, and she’s free.

Icy has finished getting all her magic back from the vacuum, she’s just _looking_ at Bloom, gorgeous and powerful, and Bloom nearly forgets what she needs to do.

It’s ridiculous, how much she wants to stick around and fight her, now that she’s back at full power.

But still, Bloom has a job to do, and this detour has already taken too long.

She manages a smirk, wings propelling her upwards.

“As much as I’d love to stay and chat,” -and she’d like to hit herself for just how _true_ that is, goddamnit- “I’ve really got to be going.”

And with that, she zooms over Icy’s head, flying at full speed.

Her departure is followed by an enraged scream, and then Icy gives chase.

Once again, Bloom finds herself dodging ice blasts. Except, this time, she doesn’t want to get caught.

She’s managed to piss Icy off, though, judging by the yelling that accompanies the magic. And Bloom gets it, honestly. If the witch ever decided to up and leave in the middle of a fight - worse, before any fight even started - because she had more important things to deal with… Bloom would get pretty pissed as well.

But Valtor is still in the building.

Bloom can feel it, whatever magic he’s made of responding to the Dragon’s flame inside her.

And she really needs to stop him from getting the whatever-it-is he’s after. There will be other other opportunities to fight with Icy.

(the fact that she is comforted by this is getting put in a little box in her mind where she sticks all the other things she doesn’t want to think about.)

(if she was still going to therapy, her therapist would want her to go through the contents of that box.)

(unfortunately, for the past two years she’s been too busy learning magic and saving the world to go. which, ironically, has made the need for therapy even greater than before.)

She’s ripped away from her thoughts about her mental health care (or lack-thereof) by an ice dagger nearly impaling her wings.

Right. Not the time for that.

Not the time for much, really.

Bloom rounds a corner, pushing herself out of Icy’s line of sight, and dives into an alcove she’d spotted earlier when they’d gone through this same hallway. Icy doesn’t see her, flying past as a ball of cold and indignation, leaving the museum walls frosted as she goes.

Bloom takes the opportunity to double back around and take another hallway, in the direction the Flame seems to tug towards.

She has a wizard to stop.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you guys liked it!


End file.
